US Indymedia Centers

Boston, MA- Responding to the May 26th arrest of Joe Previtera, (for silently posing as an Abu Ghraib prisoner, see May 27 and June 1 postings below) the B2B group put out a call to converge on the military recruiting center this past Saturday, June 5th at 11:00 a.m. And converge we did!

We came prepared to express ourselves creatively. A woman dressed as the statue of liberty was blindfolded with the US flag. Another activist wore the infamous black shawl and hood from Abu Ghraib. A third person had on the orange jumpsuit of Guantánamo Bay, including heavy-duty earphones for sensory deprivation. The fourth was dressed in a dark suit and Rumsfeld mask—a nasty job, but someone had to do it.

Former city council candidate Aimee Smith was arrested at MIT Friday morning while handing out flyers about the South End's proposed Bio-Terrorism Lab. They distributed informational literature about the proposed "Bio-Safety Lab", a laboratory that can also be described as a BioWeapons Lab, to people arriving to attend the day's graduation ceremonies. Smith, a recent alumna of MIT, was with three other members of the Social Justice Cooperative, a recognized campus group, when she was arrested.

Activists Vow to Find Other Means to Reveal Abuses of Chestnut Hill based Seaboard
Corporation

In an early morning court hearing in Newton District Court on Thursday, April 18th,
Judge Dyanne J. Klein banned international activists Cha-Cha Connors and Kevin Ksen
from future demonstrations against Chestnut Hill based Seaboard Corporation’s Board
of Directors. The one-year stay-away order marks an escalation of the Boston area
campaign in support of the Ava Guarani and Kolla indigenous communities in Northern
Argentina. In recent months, these indigenous communities have been violently
removed from their ancestral land, physically threatened and harassed by Seaboard
employees.

Joe Previtera, a twenty one year old student at Boston College, was arrested Wednesday and charged with felonies after dressing as a hooded Iraqi prisoner in front of a military recruitment center on Tremont St. in downtown Boston. In his arraignment today a Suffolk County District Attorney suggested that Mr. Previtera's bail be set at $10,000. However, a National Lawyers Guild attorney and Mr. Previtera's mother, also an attorney, persuaded the judge to free Previtera on personal recognizance.

BOSTON- 5/26/04- A group of people got together to do an action at the Tremont St Armed Forces Career Center (AFCC) in Boston. JP and CW met NF and JM at the location. (11:00 am) JP donned a black hood, a loosing fitting black shawl, sandals and two black cords hanging from his hands. He was standing on top of a plastic milk crate. (11:25 am)

This was a visual approximation of the infamous torture photos from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

Around 5 pm on May 24th, 2004, protestors gathered outside Cambridge city hall demanding the dropping of all charges against the Lafayette 8. The Lafayette 8 were arrested on April 14th in Lafayette Square, Cambridge while working on a community cleanup process. The site, a now abandoned Shell station, had been seized by the city through eminent domain. Despites promises to convert it into a public park, the site had been left as a wasteland, replete with broken bottles and scrap-metal. At around 5:45 some of the protestors filed into the Cambridge City Council hall to support a resolution for increased civilian oversight of the police sponsored by Council Member Denise Simmons. The first speaker touched on the use of service revolvers in arresting unarmed minors and the defunct Police Review Advisory Board. Although mandated by the City Council, the city manager, Robert Healy, has yet to staff the board. Following several other speeches, the council moved to postpone the resolution.

Racism being crucial to the killing, torture and humiliation of Iraqis, ostensibly called "abuse", is hardly mentioned in discussions on the subject. So that any attempt to reverse the horrors will remain largely cosmetic. To claim that the savagery wa the work of a few, courtesy digital technology, is to make the equally absurd claim that the brutal beating of Rodney King was a simple aberration and thus racism in American is a thing of the past. Please watch carefully the rhetoric of denial and see through it. Then perhaps, an appreciation of the depth of entrenchment of racism might throw some light as to what awaits Iraqis – the much touted “American moral values".

Lawyers and activists in Seattle are putting out the ali-ali all come free call to the 155 activists arrested at first and broad streets on December 1st in the 1999 Seattle WTO protests. A class action lawsuit; Hickey v. City of Seattle has been won on their behalf by the Trial Lawyers for Public Justice (TLPJ) and the City of Seattle is paying $250,000 in damages for wrongful arrest. A second class action suit for people arrested inside the allegedly unconstitutional “no-protest zone” is still underway and awaiting the result of an appeal.